Analogical Inferred Compensation Method for Heterogeneous Database Schema Mismatch and Its Application of Hypermedia Cooperative Work System

Hypermedia Cooperative Work systems (HMCW) that simply use object-oriented databases have already been developed, but almost of them are not always regard to directly access stationary databases such as CD-ROMs and other conventional databases because of the need to convert to another media or to compensate for database schema mismatch. In order to solve these problems, we propose a new architecture with 3-level schema management to handle data in the heterogeneous database, and a dynamic schema mismatch compensation method based on an analogical inference mechanism. The effectiveness of this architecture and this method is established by using them in a practical hypermedia cooperative work environment: a patent information system.